Making Friends
by peroxidepest17
Summary: Follow up to “Come Monday” Ikkaku and Kira become buddies. Simple as that.


**Title:** Making Friends  
**Universe:** Bleach  
**Theme/Topic:** N/A  
**Rating:** PG  
**Character/Pairing/s:** Ikkaku, Kira  
**Warnings/Spoilers:** Spoilers for the SS arc.  
**Word Count: **1,845  
**Summary:** Follow up to "Come Monday"- Ikkaku and Kira become buddies. Simple as that.  
**Dedication:** cheloya and swinku for awesome Ikkira fanworks. SORRY MINE ARE SO SUCKY IN COMPARISON.  
**A/N:** UM, I don't know, honestly. I wanted to write something fun and cracky, but in the end this idea sort of took off and I had to finish it before anything else. It is full of stupid and kind of boring, but I guess I am a sucker for the odd, quiet moments. Anyway, it is like, 1 am now and I am too tired to give it a read through, so bear with me, k?  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine, though I wish constantly.  
**Distribution:** Just lemme know.

* * *

For Kira Izuru, Monday morning came and went.

There was no solemn changing of the guard.

There was no ceremony, no formality, not even a single mover in sight to signify the enormous transformations he and the rest of his division were to undergo on this day.

All he got come Monday morning was a nonchalant Madarame Ikkaku slouching through the door at seven am, completely devoid of any personal belongings save for an impressive gourd of sake strapped to his hakama-himo and a package presumably containing his brand new captain's coat in hand.

Kira was still sitting in contemplation on the empty floor of Ichimaru Gin's old office when his new captain arrived—earlier than expected—and surprised, he'd looked up in embarrassment before scrambling to his feet hastily to salute, to welcome his new taichou here.

"Yo," Ikkaku was all said as he stepped inside and looked around. "Damn, it's pretty empty in here, ain't it?" he murmured, and tossed the package with his coat in it in the far corner.

Kira blinked. "Um…yes?"

Ikkaku mentally shrugged. "Whatever, I'll drag some chairs'n stuff in from the reception area or something, I guess."

That said, Kira watched him as he plopped down on the floor right in front of his new vice-captain without another word and unknotted the rope holding his container of sake to his person. Only after the jug was un-strapped and uncorked and the smell of alcohol was rich in the empty space around them did the former eleventh division shinigami look up again, eyeing Kira (who was notably, still standing at perfect attention).

"Uh, you wanna have a seat or something?" Ikkaku offered, after a beat.

"Of course," Kira murmured, and quickly sat down, folding his knees under him in perfect seiza form.

Ikkaku in the meantime, braced the jug against one of his knees and looked at the blond for a little while before taking a big pull for himself.

"Aaah," he breathed, sounding satisfied after he'd swallowed. "Good stuff."

Kira wasn't quite sure how to respond to that.

But before he could, the jug was shoved right under his nose. "Have some."

The vice-captain stared. "It's seven am."

Ikkaku shrugged. "Better'n coffee, you ask me." A beat. "But suit yourself, I guess," he added, and withdrew the alcohol. "We got time."

"No… I mean…" Pause, deep breath. "I'll have some," Kira told him, and wondered if this was some sort of a test or something. Ichimaru-taichou had always been full of tests, after all.

"Don't force yourself or anything," Ikkaku said, eyeing the other man for a long moment. "I mean, I been up all night, so it ain't too early for me, really."

"I'll have some," Kira said, more resolutely this time.

Ikkaku chuckled at how eager he sounded. "Sure." He held out the sake again.

Kira accepted the jug cautiously this time, taking a deep breath before tossing back a short pull from the container. However he nearly coughed it all back out for the strength of the flavor as it suddenly invaded (and overwhelmed) his taste buds. It was much cheaper than what he and Hisagi-san usually had on the occasions where they went out together, and definitely far harsher than any of the fine flavors Ichimaru-taichou had introduced him to over the years.

Rough, in short. Unrefined, perhaps.

He managed to swallow his mouthful though, and only coughed a little bit after he did. Luckily nothing came back up.

Ikkaku only grinned. "Strong, right? 's the good stuff there. None of your frilly, fake shit."

Kira wondered if his new captain was trying to tell him something when he said that, and passed the drink back to him carefully. He watched as Madarame-taichou took another long draught without so much as batting an eye.

"You um… you've been up all night?" he questioned after a moment of silence between them, in which the sake was passed back to him. He took a drink by rote, and the second time around wasn't so bad as the first.

"Couldn't sleep," Ikkaku admitted, a bit sheepishly.

"Oh. Were you um… nervous?" the blond offered, and wondered if Madarame Ikkaku had been anywhere as anxious as he'd been, waiting for dawn to break on this monumental Monday morning.

"Indigestion," Ikkaku said after a moment. "Yumi'n the fellas took me to this expensive type tofu pot place in Rukongai. Musta ate too much kimchi or something." He shook his head at the memory, and took another drink before passing the jug back to his new vice-captain.

Kira's expression fell a bit. "Oh." He took another pull without thinking about it.

Ikkaku grinned when the blond didn't even react that time. "Gettin' used to the taste yet?"

"Ah… oh, yes, I suppose so."

After that they didn't really say much more, just passing the sake back and forth and taking turns drinking, Kira occasionally posing a question just to break the silence when he felt the need, Ikkaku occasionally answering when he felt the need.

And just like that, bit by bit, the sake dwindled down in the jug and Kira's worries started feeling farther and farther away the more he had.

At around nine am, he thought he might have been a little drunk.

What a way to start the day, he thought to himself, and at the same time, didn't feel particularly sorry for it. Though that might have been the wine talking.

At around ten, after the last drop of sake was gone, Ikkaku stood abruptly, and offered his vice-captain a hand up. "There," he said, and only seemed pleasantly buzzed at most, even despite the fact that he'd had much more to drink than Izuru had.

"There?" Kira asked, and took the offered hand automatically; let himself be pulled back to his feet.

"Now we're buddies."

The blond cocked his head to the side, swayed a bit on his feet. "Buddies? How?"

Ikkaku sighed. "'Cuz we drank together," he said, slowly. "Damn, are you actually drunk already? We ain't even passed out cups to the rest of the division yet."

"Maybe," Kira sniffed. "And I don't think we have that many cups on hand anyway."

The bald shinigami snorted. "You are drunk."

"Maybe," Kira repeated again, because it seemed like the thing to say.

"Well, whatever," Ikkaku said, and without hesitation, grabbed his vice-captain's arm and pulled the other man against his side, taking some of Kira's weight onto his own shoulders as he supported him towards the door. "They gotta share anyway, or this'll never work."

"This?"

"The cup exchange, dumbass."

Kira chuckled a bit. "Oh. For buddies."

"Yeah," Ikkaku said, like it was that simple. "We can drink together, means we can all be friends."

"That's all?" It sounded a lot simpler than Ichimaru's methods of making friends. Too simple, to be honest, and Kira wasn't sure he believed the other man when he said it. There had to be a greater trial, didn't there? More proof. It was something you could only earn, after all. "There's got to be more to it than that," he voiced, when he couldn't figure it out on his own.

Ikkaku in the meantime, looked at him a bit incredulously. "That's all there is to makin' _buddies,"_ the bald shinigami told him. "But like hell that's _all_. Don't you know anything?"

Kira supposed that it was very likely that he didn't, all things considered. "Explain it to me then. I don't think I understand."

Ikkaku shook his head. "They don't teach anyone anything important nowadays, do they?" he breathed, before sighing and moving to explain. "We drink together, we're buddies."

"So you've said."

"Shut up and listen will ya, smartass? There's an order to this. Anyway, we drink together and we're buddies. Then we fight together, and we're a team. After that…"

"There's more after team?" That was also something that had never come up under Ichimaru-taichou's reign here, as far as he knew.

"I told you to shut up, didn't I? Man you get mouthy when you're sloshed."

"What comes after team?" Kira pressed, and didn't know why it was suddenly so important for him to know.

Ikkaku's grunted. "Well, then we fight with one another, of course. And that makes us…"

Kira's throat went dry. "Enemies?"

The taller man actually reached out and smacked him for saying that—not hard, but not really soft either. "No, not enemies. The hell is wrong with you? It makes us_ family_, dumb shit."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Sure it does. Look, if I gotta be nice to you all the time no matter what, that only means I'm pretendin' don't it? But if I can kick your ass and you can kick mine…I know we're bein' honest with each other. And even after all that, if we can still drink together afterwards? That's family, dummy."

Kira wasn't sure how to respond to that. So he rubbed absently the spot on his head where Ikkaku had struck him and said, "Oh."

But even still, all he could think was that he'd never even so much as quarreled with Ichimaru a single day of his life, and wasn't it supposed to be that way between captains and their subordinates? Beyond friends, beyond family, they would always be superior and subordinate, wouldn't they?

Needless to say, it all made Madarame's way of thinking a very foreign concept to what Izuru had learned to expect after all these years as a member of the gotei-13.

He wasn't sure if he could believe it.

And perhaps his confusion over the matter was written plainly on his face, because after a moment, Ikkaku just snorted at him in a resigned sort of way. "Don't blow a gasket trying to figure it all out while you're drunk, dumbass. I'll show you. We got time."

Oddly enough, something about the promise in that crude statement made Kira smile a little—he wasn't sure what or why. "Because we're buddies now?"

"And because you are clearly the dumbest guy I ever met and need all the goddamned help you can get."

Kira chuckled. "Okay."

Later, at the third division's first ever (but far from last) cup exchange, all of Izuru's earlier drinking caught up with him halfway through the ceremony and he ended up vomiting up all over Madarame-taichou's feet.

And instead of apologizing, he ended up passing out instead, leaving Ikkaku to carry him back to the barracks.

Which led the now-twitching third division captain to believe that despite being a clueless dumbass, Kira seemed to have most of the basic tenants of this whole family thing already worked out, somewhere deep down inside. Probably buried under all the bullshit Ichimaru had been feeding him for the past however many years.

And as Madarame-taichou changed his socks and shoes after tossing the idiot into bed, he consoled himself with the promise that he was going to be the one who got to kick Izuru's ass until that knowledge wasn't buried anymore.

Because that was what family did.

**END**


End file.
